History

The earliest railroads looked little like their modern ancestors. Beyond the rails and wheels on cars, they had little in common. They couldn’t haul the huge loads that today’s railroads can and their mode of power was either man or animal, usually horse or ox.

The Greene County Railroad is a bit of a curiosity. Its name would suggest it served — or at least passed through — Greene County, but that’s not the case. The railroad’s predecessor, the Bostwick Railroad, built a seven-mile line from Bostwick to Appalachee, which was on the Central of Georgia line between Macon and Athens. A report in the Feb. 22, 1907, edition of the (Athens, Ga.) Weekly Banner noted the road “has been completed to the city limits of Appalachee, and on the first of March the line will be completed and trains run into that little city.

In 1881, Tombstone was a remote mining community. There was no railroad link to Tombstone for the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral. During the next two decades, city leaders debated the need for a railroad and urged railroad officials to lay tracks into town, but nothing materialized.

For 41 years, policymakers and the public have debated the benefits and pitfalls of Amtrak. The national railroad, created as a result of the President Richard Nixon-signed Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, operates 305 weekday trains across a network of 21,100 rail miles. The new railroad took over passenger service from struggling railroads, and its first train, The Clocker, departed from Union Station in New York at 12:05 a.m. on May 1, 1971. Amtrak for years has touted ridership gains. According to Amtrak, between October 2011 and August 2012, ridership was up 3.4 percent. By Sept. 30, when the